What is Macon

Macon is my home town. I wasn't born there; we moved there right after I completed the first grade. But that's where I grew up, that's where my childhood memories are from, and that's where my hometown is.

Macon is a small Midwestern county seat town of about 5,000 people in northeast Missouri, about 50 miles north of Columbia. It's the center of commerce for Macon County. It's the home of the Macon Tigers. It's the home of some light manufacturing and some retail stores that serve the area. There's a Wal-Mart on the edge of town and the requisite fast food places. Deer hunting is big business in Macon.

My Three Macons

Like I said, I went to school in Macon. I sang in the choir and played piano in the jazz band. I was in Finian's Rainbow, the very first Broadway musical that the high school performed. I wore tights in the chorus of Camelot.

And in The Music Man, I played Jacey Squires, the owner of the local livery stable and the first tenor in the barbershop quartet. I was the one who screamed "Ice Cream" on a high "A" at the climatic moment when the four members of the school board suddenly realized that they could get along better if they sang barbershop music. (More on that later.)

After my graduation, I left Macon. I haven't lived there in over 30 years. I go back a couple of times a year to visit my mother, who still lives there. So this web site isn't a definitive version of Macon as written by a current resident. It has been created by someone who left and is now looking back. It's a unique combination of the Macon I remember, the Macon I see now, and the Macon I found through my postcard collection.

My First Macon

I remember growing up in Macon in the mid-to-late 1960s. I knew the city like the back of my hand. We could walk or ride our bicycles anywhere. Summers were especially fun. Mom and Dad came home from work for lunch just about every day. Lunch hours were really an hour long back then. Everything was close to everything else. It was a tiny world, but there was really no reason to go anywhere else.

The highlight of summers was the annual Sidewalk Bazaar. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was really just an excuse for the downtown merchants to unload their end-of-season merchandise. But to a kid, it was as grand as any circus. A small carnival brought rides into town. Downtown streets were blocked off and there were people everywhere. Kids lined up dozens-deep to have the honor of getting soaked in the dunking tank in front of Taylor's News & Book Store.

Downtown itself was uniquely interesting. Macon has a large courthouse, like most Midwestern county seats do. But the downtown wasn't built around the courthouse. The courthouse is a few blocks north, all by itself in a residential area. Even though downtown was essentially four city blocks, it was really only two: Rollins street and Vine street. The corner of Rollins and Vine was the middle of the town; everything seemed to radiate from that point.

My Second Macon

In the early 1970s, the inevitable happened. A new shopping center opened on the highway at the edge of town. I remember people predicted that would signal the demise of downtown. They were right.

The fast food establishments grew up on the highway around the shopping center. A Wal-Mart soon opened just down the road. JC Penney's, Western Auto, Sears, and Coast-to-Coast eventually abandoned downtown. The movie theatre closed.

Downtown Macon exists today as a shell of what it once was.

Those are two views of Macon: what I remember of the glories of downtown, and the sad reality of what it is today.

My Third Macon

But there is a third Macon. And for that story, we have to go both forward and backward in time.

Now that I live in Kansas City, I occasionally have opportunities to perform with small groups in community and church theatre. Last year, I was invited to play in the orchestra for a small local college's production of The Music Man. Since I was already familiar with the musical, I eagerly looked forward to being a part of it again.

About the same time, I was browsing through through eBay and I stumbled upon a 100-year-old postcard of Macon's First Baptist Church. I spent a few bucks and soon had in my possession an antique picture of my home church. I wondered if, by chance, there were other antique pictures of Macon preserved by postcards. Sure enough, there were dozens of them.

Soon, eBay became a virtual connection to my past as I started buying every Macon postcard I could find. But I wasn't sure why I was buying them. And I didn't know what I was going to do with them.

As I went to the rehearsals of The Music Man, the memories of our high school production came flooding back. I could sing every song, I remembered every line of dialog.

But I was also struck by the scenery -- and the culture -- of River City, Iowa in 1915. The "Ice Cream Sociable". The "Foot Bridge". The railroad. The library. The ladies committee. Chats on the front porch. Something seemed familiar, comfortable.

And then it hit me. The Macon in my postcards was my "River City"!

I looked again at the pictures I had accumulated. The churches. The court house. Downtown. The hospital. The Elk Lodge. The railroads. The turn-of-the-century Macon was everything that The Music Man said it was.

Life was simple then. Trains brought people to and from the city. In fact, Macon was the city, because the rest of the county was rural. You stayed at home. Or you went to school, or to church, or shopping. But you stayed in Macon. It seemed like the world had always been that way. And it seemed like it was going to remain that way forever.

The third Macon is the Macon on my postcards. And that's the way I want to remember it.